March 5, 2015 – Emotional Intelligence Applied to Business and Engineering

On March 5, 2015 the UBC CSCE Student Chapter invited Dr. Tom Culham to provide a two hour seminar on the role of emotional intelligence and personal ethics in the business world. Tom has 30 years of engineering experience and completed his Ph. D in 2012 at Simon Fraser University. His thesis, Ethics Education of Business Leaders, drew on neuroscience, psychology, virtue ethics, and leadership education emphasizing emotional intelligence.

The two part seminar provided CSCE members with an introduction to the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) and its role in business success. The lecture’s first half emphasized the ties between EI, personal virtue ethics, and decision making, focusing on the following points:

Mindfulness helps people

Become fully present, aware, and effective leaders;

Develop authenticity and compassion for oneself;

Clarify personal values;

Increase their awareness of the emotional dimension;

Improve decision making by accessing emotional knowledge,

Reduce emotional stress

Low emotional intelligence often corresponds to a lack of self-awareness, low self-compassion, and may lead to little self-regulation and poor leadership

The latter half of the seminar comprised of a situational exercise where groups were given a hypothetical business setting demonstrating ethics in action. This was followed by a discussion on the origins of ethical decision making.

We would like to thank Dr. Culham for this informative and engaging seminar. For more information, Dr. Culham’s book “Ethics Education of Business Leaders” is available for sale at the UBC Bookstore or electronically at the library, and he also recommends “The Power of Positive Emotions”. The slides from the seminar can found here.